Luvvies with wobbly sets? Oh no they're not! Raising the curtain on the new am-dram

Amateur dramatics is the most maligned of artforms, but an attempt to restore its credibility is underway. From panto to Shakespeare, and West End productions, there's more theatrical ambition on display than you might think

What a performance: local theatre actors at Boxmoor Playhouse in Hemel Hemptead, Hertfordshire. Photograph: Richard Saker

Luvvies with wobbly sets? Oh no they're not! Raising the curtain on the new am-dram

Amateur dramatics is the most maligned of artforms, but an attempt to restore its credibility is underway. From panto to Shakespeare, and West End productions, there's more theatrical ambition on display than you might think

The director, Karina, puts her hand up and her cast freeze momentarily. "Lewis, your line is getting muffled by her breasts." Lewis, held in a dying embrace by a young woman, extracts himself from her bosom. "And Maggie, you're starting to sound a bit more American than Somerset."

A few more notes, then the rehearsal restarts; after a little while, an unexpected silence indicates that someone is missing from the scene. "Where's Paul?" asks Karina.

"It's his 39th wedding anniversary…"

The Hemel Hempstead Theatre Company is preparing for its amateur production of Wyrd Sisters, a stage adaptation of the Terry Pratchett novel. It will only have a four-night run, but rehearsals have been going on for two months, up to five times a week, and in most instances the cast come here – the Boxmoor Playhouse – straight from work and stay till late. The HHTC owns the theatre; tonight, however, a local dance club has hired it out, so Karina Bygate and her troupe are rehearsing backstage, where the shelves are full of boxes with labels like "Jodhpurs and military trousers" and "Period nightwear".

When you think of amateur dramatics, the stress tends to fall on the first word of the phrase – village halls, a dusty old play and an even older cast – but as Bygate points out, there's no lack of skill among her team. Several of the actors are drama-school trained, and a couple are ex-professionals, while the number of people "in trades" means that the technical side is extremely well catered for.

There is a quiet move afoot to restore the reputation of "am-dram". The Royal Shakespeare Company has been celebrating amateur theatre with its year-long "Open Stages" programme, inviting more than 7,000 non-professionals around the country to learn from their expertise in "skills exchange workshops". Regional theatres have taken up the cause, too, and this autumn has seen a series of showcases in theatres from the Lyric, Belfast to the Sage, Gateshead and Contact in Manchester. Sky Arts, meanwhile, has just completed its search for the Nation's Best Am Dram in a reality show that promised, in its first episode, to pluck "diamonds from the am-dram dung heap". The winning company, Crossmichael Drama Club from Galloway, Scotland, were given the chance to perform – for one night only – in London's West End (and we'll find out how their production of The Hypochondriac by Molière went in this Wednesday's final episode).

This year has showcased all manners of community involvement in performance arts; from the spectacles of the Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies to the far more intimate experiences created by companies such as You Me Bum Bum Train, we have seen entire theatrical productions crafted around the input of unpaid volunteers. Community theatre seems to have landed on the cultural map – although many would argue that it has been there all along, and nobody was looking. The most recent figures available suggest there are some 30,000 community productions a year, and 2,500 groups performing them. Many amateur companies, meanwhile, operate in places that regional programmes and touring companies simply don't reach.

Hemel Hempstead is not what you would call a cultural nirvana; the HHTC's 150-seater theatre is now the biggest arts venue in town, and its annual panto always sells out – Christmas is boom time for amateur theatre. For Wyrd Sisters, meanwhile, Karina expects a half-full house. "We'd like to get more because we've all worked so hard," she says. "But we're fighting against people's ideas of am-dram – wobbly sets, people forgetting their lines."

The Wyrd Sisters set, I can report, is as robust as they come. The cues aren't always so solid, but there are still a couple of weeks to go, and there are more pressing concerns. Lewis is moving about the stage on crutches after a parkour accident. "Can I ask something?" he asks during one scene. "Can I faint here?" "No!" replies Bygate. "I've had enough of you bloody falling over."

There is, of course, a good reason for am-dram's ill fame. Speaking as someone who has dabbled, it can be – quite aside from the internecine politics and bouts of histrionic luvviedom – a fairly stagnant art form. A friend who appeared in My Fair Lady remembered the looks of horror when it was suggested that Eliza Doolittle stand up during a conversation with Professor Higgins. "But this is the tea scene!" a co-actor cried. "We always do this scene seated!" And while certain theatrical tenets are passed down with the gravitas of religious law – never speak a line with your back to the audience! Never upstage your fellow actor! – the chances are your director has learned everything he or she knows from their predecessor. This may not amount to much.

I meet Ian Wainwright, the producer of Open Stages, at one of the RSC workshops in the company's Stratford-upon-Avon rehearsal rooms. He points out that several of the RSC's most prestigious alumni – Ian McKellen, Richard Wilson, Oliver Ford Davies – all honed their skills in amateur theatre. "And our director, Michael Boyd, began his theatrical career at an amateur theatre in London," he says. "Actually he says he had his first sexual contact there, too – he put his hand on a girl's knee…"

That was then. Today you would be hard pushed to find a young professional who had any experience in the amateur leagues at all. "The two worlds are completely separate," agrees Wainwright. They began to diverge in the 1960s, when traditional repertory theatre went into a terminal decline. Funding from the Arts Council was diverted to the creation of regional theatres, and amateur theatre was left to fend for itself. Its legacy was a generational gap in terms of theatre practice: while Peter Brook and other pioneers were pushing boundaries, much am-dram continued on, for 30 years or more, in the old repertory style.

"Physical theatre, new forms and styles – that's a lot of what we're finding we have to fill in," says Wainwright. It's something you notice when watching Nation's Best Am Dram: the professional mentors parachuted in to help the amateur companies, from Richard Wilson and Harriet Walter to Martin Shaw, sometimes look bemused at the techniques, or lack of them, applied by their protégés.

The groups at this RSC workshop have very different levels of experience – from a village theatre attempting Shakespeare for the first time to a Sutton Coldfield cast who are in the middle of a three-week run of Terence Rattigan's After the Dance – but everyone is lapping up the advice. Simon, a director with the Sutton Coldfield group, can already see how the techniques he's learning could revitalise the way they rehearse. "Normally the actors arrive and just say: 'Where do you want me?'" he laughs. "So I just tell them where to stand."

'We're fighting against people's ideas of am-dram' …a member of the Hemel Hempstead Theatre Company in costume for Wyrd Sisters. Photograph: Richard Saker

Wainwright is keen to point out, however, that there is nothing "remedial" about the workshops – "Everything they do here will be exactly what we do with our own actors," he says, seriously. "This is not an outreach project, it's not: 'Here we come to show you how to do theatre…' We wanted to find out what's out there because we've ignored amateur theatre; we just don't know. And we've been massively surprised: it's a voyage of discovery to find out how much there is and how much commitment people show."

Questors, in the west London borough of Ealing, is the acme of amateur theatre. Its state-of-the-art 400-seater playhouse and smaller studio theatre are rarely out of use: it stages around 10 full productions a year. When I visit, Romeo and Juliet is in its final rehearsals. The director, who runs an online ironmongery in the daytime, sits at a trestle table alongside a stage manager, assistant stage manager, lighting manager and a prompt; ring-binders and scripts, covered in notes and Post-its, are sprawled around them. When someone wants to speak, there's no need to call for silence: the cast are well disciplined and eager. Occasionally overeager – when Romeo fights Tybalt in the first half run-through, he has to check he hasn't broken his friend's nose.

Juliet is a Westminster council worker in her 20s; at the interval she heads to the downstairs bar for a cheeky half. The cast rehearse four nights a week and every Sunday. "That's what's great about these guys," she says. "Some amateur groups like the drinking, they like the chatting. These guys know what they're here for." Five rehearsals a week sounds rather a hefty commitment. "Well, you have ups and downs. They're creative people, so it can get stressful sometimes." Two new members who have just arrived from Australia say they are astonished at how well resourced the organisation is. "They've got a huge workshop out the back where they make all their own sets and props," one of them tells me with wide eyes.

This is another hidden truth of amateur theatre: it is often extremely well resourced. Because paying for actors and crew makes up the bulk of a production's costs, amateur theatre is able to spend its budgets more freely. One fight director I spoke to told me that when amateur companies ask for his services, he assumes they will balk at his fees, but they are normally much more willing to pay than professional companies. "The difference is, when you're putting something on on the fringe, you're constantly looking for ways to save money. You think: 'Do we really need that bit of set, or that prop? Can we do without it?'"

"There's this stereotype of people muddling through in am-dram," agrees Wainwright, "but if you're involved in theatre, at whatever level, you want to do your best. Compare it to music. If you say you're in a band, no one asks: 'Are you amateur or professional?'"

Perhaps most significantly, amateur companies are increasingly bold in their choice of material. I remember thinking at the time that the company I joined was pretty edgy for taking on work by Howard Brenton and Harold Pinter; this year, they're auditioning for plays by Richard Bean and Martin McDonagh.

Stephen Briggs, the man who first adapted Wyrd Sisters for the stage from Terry Pratchett's novel in 1996, has been involved in amateur theatre in Oxfordshire for more than three decades and his adaptations of Monty Python films and Pratchett novels – now performed globally – were born out of frustration. "There was a tendency to stick with those things that people assume that amateur theatre does: whodunnits, Agatha Christie, old Whitehall farces and things that bring punters in," he says. "I think now we're more inclined to try to get hold of stuff while it's on in the West End or as soon as it's off, even quite challenging productions."

Hemel Hempstead Theatre Company rehearsing for a production of Wyrd Sisters. Photograph: Nick Spurling for the Observer

When Samuel French released the rights to the West End adaptation of Calendar Girls, which requires the all-female cast to strip off completely on stage, they were inundated with more than 600 applications, sparking a rush to be the first to stage the play. Of course Calendar Girls, with its cosy WI characters, does play to the demographic you might expect within amateur theatre. For Briggs, whose Abingdon-based group boasts a wide range of ages and backgrounds, it is "vital" that the amateur world starts appealing to youth, "otherwise you end up with 70-year-olds playing 20-year-olds".

Perhaps amateur theatre's best hope is this renewed relationship with its professional cousin. Community involvement in regional theatres has resulted in some high-profile collaborations, such as York Theatre Royal's staging of the Mystery Plays with more than 1,000 non-professionals earlier this year. Not only did it raise the profile of amateur theatre to young people, it also engaged the local community in a more direct way. "Half of those who took part in the Mystery Plays had never been involved in theatre before," its director, Damian Cruden, tells me.

Back in Hemel Hempstead, the final performance of Wyrd Sisters proceeds smoothly, and to a cheeringly full house. No one forgets their lines, the costumes and the set hold up and the audience is laughing at the jokes, not the acting. Karina looks relieved, although there's no resting on her laurels, as she now has the Christmas pantomime – Peter Pan – to organise. "Oh well," she says gamely. "That's what the professionals have to cope with."